When the ongoing tale of Tiger Woods’ misdeeds began its media circus, the avalanche brought back memories of other misguided efforts to dodge negative news coverage.

My last seven months of U.S. Air Force service, after my WWII combat flying career, were as a military public relations officer. Just days after reporting as PRO for Bowman Field at Louisville, Ky., I was awakened at 2 a.m. with instructions to report immediately to the base commanding officer.

The CO informed me that a training flight had crashed, ordered me to take care of the media by “keeping it out of the papers” and told his sergeant to find me an office and telephone.

Promptly I began calling the wires, local papers and radio stations — there was no TV in 1945 — to inform them about the crash. And remembering my newspaper days when I would be incensed by sources trying to hide unfavorable news, I promised to provide more information as it became available.

When the sergeant reported my actions, the colonel was furious about me “blatantly disobeying orders.”

I reminded him he had told me to “take care of it,” and said that was exactly what I was doing.

“You must be crazy! I’ll bust you,” was his angry response. “Why the last time when we wouldn’t talk to them, they kept the story going for weeks!”

I attempted to reassure him that by promptly disclosing the crash and by providing details, the story would fade away in a few days. Which is exactly what happened. Later the colonel did apologize and I went on to employ the same crisis communications’ approach as during my Air Force PR days.

After more than 63 years later, this remains the agency’s standard operating procedure when the news ain’t good.

With the proliferation of social media and its concurrent appearance a couple of years ago of the “social media press release,” it would seem the traditional press release is bound for the proverbial circular file. When you consider the rapid decline in newspapers and magazines, one wonders if there’s even anyone out there to send a release.

A recent survey by Ragan Communications and PollStream found that most PR practitioners are not ready to give up the old standby yet:

The poll found that 49 percent of 401 respondents believe press releases are “as useful as ever.” Another 33 percent said releases a necessary evil that won’t go away soon, in part because of SEC notification rules. Almost two-thirds (64 percent) said they target press releases most often to print outlets, and 23 percent target online news and financial sites as well.

Nearly half (45 percent) of respondents cited social media as the culprit in press releases’ loss of relevance. But 23 percent blamed the demand for a more trustworthy and/or engaging information source and 24 percent cited the decline of the newspaper and magazine industry.

But for now, it looks like the press release is still relevant. We still use them here at our agency, though now we add more links in the first paragraph, make sure we optimize keywords in the headline and body copy and keep them shorter and tighter — all ways to optimize them for search engines. Each release also gets posted to a Web site with its own URL, which also expands its reach on the Internet.

This post was borrowed from Ragan Communications, which had borrowed it from the Bad Pitch Blog.

PR People: Stop Being Bad at Stuff and Read This
By Nick Balkin

A cornucopia of pitch practices certain to make you unforgettable to the media

Face it: You went into PR because you wanted to be a superstar. Unfortunately, sometimes you have to work hard to build your name and reputation before you score those VIP passes.

Lucky for you, I’ve learned some extremely helpful tips and tricks to navigate the murky waters of being totally awesome, and today only, I’m going to share them with you.

1. Express yourself
The look of your press release is very important. The first rule of e-mailing is that EVERY SUBJECT LINE YOU SEND SHOULD USE ALL CAPS AND END WITH AT LEAST FIVE EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!!! THE MORE EXCLAMATION POINTS, THE BETTER!!!!!!! As for the content itself, black on white is played out. Jazz it up! Change your text and background colors to, say, pink on red, or teal on rainbow, yellow on orange. Anything attention-grabbing and bright will do. Also, use a fun font! Comic Sans looks very professional. For more ideas, visit any MySpace page belonging to a 14-year-old. PR GOLD!!!!!!!!

2. Play hard to get
Like Joyce’s Ulysses or any David Lynch film, a well-crafted pitch should be nearly impenetrable to mere mortals. Here’s a neat exercise: Take your “hook” or story idea and bury it under layers of lofty, abstract, dense prose. For good measure, spell things phonetically and use random, Faulknerian italics. Your target audience, after all, is composed of reporters—and we all know they have lots of time to read heavy things. It’s their job, not yours, to gauge the relevance of your information. And don’t forget, jargon is your friend—it not only spotlights your sophisticated, in-the-know, vocabulary, but it also says to the reporter: I respect your intelligence.

3. Wear them down
As soon as you’ve e-mailed your release to a reporter, wait 10-15 minutes, then send a follow-up email reminding him to read it. A few (2-3) minutes later, call the reporter and remind him to read both your e-mail and the original release. If he doesn’t pick up the phone, just go ahead and read him your entire press release, word for word, over a series of voicemails. With all the information journalists get, they’ll appreciate the transcription—it’s really cool! Repeat for five consecutive days. When you get a “No.” or a “Please stop.” or an “I’m a police reporter, I don’t care about the 10 best ways to wear a romper, I don’t even know what a romper is,” then you’re making an impression. Damn—give yourself a pat on the back!

4. Quantity trumps quality
In a perfect world, PR people would carefully tailor each pitch. But who has that kind of time or bandwidth these days? Thank goodness for mass emails (or “e-blasts”). Skip the “BCC:” function. The address of each and every recipient should be listed in the “To:” field so they can size up the competition. Don’t forget to always offer exclusives.

5. Know when to pitch
As in comedy, timing is everything. Friday, 5 p.m., before a holiday weekend: a publicist’s dream. At no other time will you find media types more focused and relaxed and therefore more open to your story ideas. So what are you waiting for? That wallpaper convention isn’t going to pitch itself—plus, it’s only four months away.

6. Lead time, schmead time
When it comes to deadlines, the media can be such drama queens, but a great story will always get coverage, right? Right? The be-all, end-all of your profession is (drum roll) your press release! Don’t rush it. It must be fully realized—bio’d, logo’d, and approved by all bosses, partners, and sponsors—before fit for distribution. Don’t compromise your art. Make sure everyone makes a note about a comma or a colon. It should take at least three weeks of rounds!

7. Those scary bloggers
Bloggers, like drug dealers, can be reluctant to talk until they know you’re “cool.” The fastest way to cozy up? Be an active commenter on their sites. Unfortunately, this means actually having to read their (sometimes very lengthy) posts. To get around this, I suggest making a list of “stock comments” that work in virtually any context. A few to get you started: “Excellent post! It’s high time we start thinking outside the box” or “Your thought leadership is inspiring!” “Bravo, sir/madame, bravo” or “Strategy-driven synergistic gold! Call me.” Post them liberally.

8. Social media mastery
PR pros, rejoice! The Twitter Revolution is upon us. Gosh isn’t it great—at 140 characters of nonsense we can have tons of fun. Begin each tweet with “For Immediate Release:” so people aren’t taken by surprise. As for Facebook, friend-request as many media contacts as possible and be the first to “like” their status updates; do this a lot. Take an active interest in their personal lives by commenting on all of their family photos, particularly the babies of friends they post. And always pitch to a reporter’s “wall”—this way, the whole community knows they’re welcome to get in on the fun.

9. A great photo can sell a story
It’s commonly known that there is only one way to send images over the Internet—via e-mail attachments. This can be a bummer, as print media folks always seem to want their images supersized. Sometimes they’ll say an image is “not hi-res enough,” and it’s really confusing because here you are looking at the exact same image and it’s huge—on your laptop monitor and on the Web page you stole it from. (I, like you, am sure it is a Mac/PC thing.) But the solution to this problem is easier than you’d think. Open the image in Photoshop, change the resolution to like 300 dpi. Don’t be alarmed if your picture now looks like a screen shot from Pong—that’s normal.

10. Stand up for your clients
When a reporter screws up—misquotes you, pans your client’s new edible line of Crocs, calls during your lunch hour, etc. —it’s your responsibility to make the reporter’s life (whatever he’s got going for him) a living hell. Ban them from your e-list. Unfollow them on Twitter. Make zany comments about them on your FriendFeed. Throw a zombie or sheep at them. Teach them a lesson. This is war.

Speaking of lessons, these are absolutely the only 10 tips you’ll need throughout your entire professional life. Remember, PR isn’t all smoke and mirrors, and name dropping, and hot parties, and lookin’ good while you sip your free martinis at the lowliest dive on the block. That’s only 95 percent of what we do. To make it in this business you’ll one day have to get your hands dirty. And that, I’m afraid, is the one really ugly truth.
This post originally ran on The Bad Pitch Blog.

Nick Balkin is an arts/education publicist based in Boston. He is tweeting away @nickbalkin.

And I’m not talking about quoting from the Sermon on the Mount in the Bible, but a passage from a “silent dialogue” with God’s son yesterday. In a press release distributed on PRWeb yesterday, an outfit called ACIMI — A Course In Miracles Inc. — Jesus is quoted from an alleged “interview” conducted by Clare Lamanna, who teaches the Course of Miracles.

However, there must have been a breakdown of the Transubstantiational Translator because Jesus’ ancient Hebrew got turned into spiritual gibberish. And while it does follow in the semi-Socratic style Jesus often employed in the Bible, He seems to have developed a habit of referring to Himself in the Third Person. But it must be Jesus. After all, it’s in quote marks:

“What does this mean for you? It means that in remembering Jesus you are remembering God. The whole relationship of the Son to the Father lies in him. His part in the Sonship is also yours, and his completed learning guarantees your own success. Is he still available for help? What did he say about this? Remember his promises, and ask yourself honestly whether it is likely that he will fail to keep them. Can God fail His Son? And can one who is one with God be unlike Him? Who transcends the body has transcended limitation. Would the greatest teacher be unavailable to those who follow him?”

Needless to say, the rest of the press release doesn’t follow Associated Press style or the widely accepted inverted-pyramid format of the traditional press release, and plays pretty fast and loose with semantics.

So who were the intended recipients of the release? God-forsaken cynical unbelieving journalists? Doubtful, though even the hardest-hearted among the Fourth Estate would have been hooked by the headline: “A Rare Interview with Jesus Christ Himself In A Course In Miracles.” Rare indeed!

But from there it would have been hard to keep a skeptic’s attention with the series of non sequiturs, incomplete sentences and spiritual babble that is set within quote marks and attributed to a silent conversation with Jesus during a “private miracle healing session” held in Wisconsin Dells, Wisc.

Perhaps it really was the intention of Jubi Onyeama — the listed media contact — to get some media placements from this “release,” and he or she plunked down a few hundred dollars to distribute it on PRWeb. But it’s clearer still that the intention was to distribute “A Course in Miracles,” an electronic book available for download free of charge from the release. Oh, and to gin up attendance at four classes where the “CIM” will be taught. No charge, but donations are accepted.

I have no qualms about admitting that behind most overt acts of public relations lurks a product and usually a spokesperson, though the product is not typically a miracle nor the pitchman a godhead.

But on the other hand, this seems more like a cult-recruitment ploy than an attempt to spread faith-borne miracles. Just ask yourself — What Would Jesus Sell?

Although the conventional public relations mantra dictates that, like children, the publicist should neither be seen nor heard, it’s always rewarding when media takes positive note of a special role played by one of us.

Such was the case when then “Miami Herald” travel editor Jay Clarke headlined a three-column story “Months of planning make ship’s arrival a splash,” lauding our agency’s efforts during the successful introduction of Royal Caribbean cruise Line’s first mega cruise ship, Sovereign of the Seas.

He credited the Newman agency with planning and executing a highly newsworthy inaugural event that resulted in major national media coverage.

Reporting that “all the preparation paid off with 11,000 showing up to cheer on the Sovereign … and the media — the target of all this organized hoopla — got a story and picture it liked,” Clarke noted that “all the publicity is doing its job.”

The campaign also was cited at the time by several travel trade publications.

The lesson is that if you have a compelling story and you can communicate it in a compelling way to appropriate media outlets, you can generate significant coverage for your client.

“Greenwashing” is an increasingly common occurrence as consumers seek products that are less environmentally harmful. PR practitioners and marketers are too willing, it seems, to sacrifice truth and accuracy to make the sale.

For instance, the American Airlines Arena in downtown Miami just last month was awarded LEED certification, even though it was built a decade ago. The reason it qualified for an environmental certification that didn’t even exist in 1999 is because of all the energy-efficiency measures built into the facility, not for environmental, but for economic reasons. The arena’s spokesman explained that the certification was important because companies want to know they are holding their event in an environmentally friendly venue.

Now that’s a greenwash if ever there was one.

In a recent study, TerraChoice Environmental Marketing found that fully 98 percent of the products that advertise as being environmentally friendly in fact commit one or more of the TerraChoice’s Seven Sins of Greenwashing.

In response to consumers demanding more “green” products, manufacturers have boosted the availability of such products between 40 percent and 174 percent in certain segments across the U.S. and Canada. But the study found that consumers are still being duped into buying products they think have less environmentally impact than they indeed do.

Here is TerraChoice’s list of the seven sins manufacturers regularly commit:

1. The Sin of the Hidden Trade-Off occurs when one environmental issue is emphasized at the expense of potentially more serious concerns. In other words, when marketing hides a trade-off between environmental issues. Paper, for example, is not necessarily environmentally preferable just because it comes from a sustainably harvested forest.
2. The Sin of No Proof happens when environmental assertions are not backed up by evidence or third-party certification. One common example is facial tissue products that claim various percentages of post-consumer recycled content without providing any supporting details.
3. The Sin of Vagueness occurs when a marketing claim is so lacking in specifics it becomes meaningless. ‘”All-natural” is an example of this. Arsenic, uranium, mercury, and formaldehyde are all naturally occurring — and poisonous. “All natural” isn’t necessarily “green.”
4. The Sin of Worshiping False Labels is when marketers create a false suggestion or certification-like image to mislead consumers into thinking that a product has been through a legitimate green certification process. One example of this sin is a brand of aluminum foil with certification-like images that show the name of the company’s own in-house environmental program for which there is no explanation.
5. The Sin of Irrelevance arises when an environmental issue unrelated to the product is emphasized. One example is the claim that a product is “CFC-free,” since CFCs are banned by law.
6. The Sin of Lesser of Two Evils occurs when an environmental claim makes consumers feel green about a product category that is itself lacking in environmental benefits. Organic cigarettes are an example of this phenomenon.
7. The Sin of Fibbing is when environmental claims are outright false. One common example is products falsely claiming to be Energy Star certified.

Recently, I responded to a HARO (a Help A Reporter Out query from a journalist) about advice for recent PR grads, and, not surprisingly, my advice was selected for publication. OK, so it was just on a Web site, but the advice is pertinent, nonetheless. The outlet is PR Talk and the column is Channel Talk. It gave me an opportunity to spout off about a couple of pet peeves when it comes to wearing my human resources hat:

The most common mistake I see grads make when they apply for a position with us is not making the effort to find out who — by name — they should address their cover letter to. When I receive a cover and resume addressed to “To Whom It May Concern,” I don’t bother to read it, I just toss it. I figure if they didn’t take the time or make the effort to call our agency and ask to whom they should address their query, they are not someone I would seriously consider for even an entry-level job. I purposefully do not include HR information on our Web site for the simple reason that if you are really interested in working for our firm and have done your homework, which includes figuring out the proper HR person, then I might be interested in talking to you. The second most-common mistake is not putting your name in the title of the file containing your cover letter and your resume. If I am conducting a job search, I’m likely to get quite a few e-mailed resumes and letters. If yours is labeled “PR_Resume_Jan_09.doc” it’s going to get lost or I have to change the file name, which is a pain, and goes down as a mark against you in my little mental book. In college these days they spend a lot of time teaching how to write the perfect cover letter and resume, but they don’t spend five minutes on these two tips, which for me are opportunity killers because they demonstrate a lack of initiative and awareness. And don’t get me started on typos ….

In a Business Week column, media reporter Jon Fine notes that the Associated Press and some unnamed publishers — we assume of newspapers — have been having informal talks about how to make their online content less available so people will pay for it. Fine offers a possible version of how this could happen:

Out of all the imperfect scenarios available, the least imperfect version looks to me like this: A bunch of news organizations get together, create a site walled off from the prying Web-crawlers of Google (and the momentary affections of the casual Web surfer), charge subscription fees and split these fees and any ad revenue.

It could work, I suppose, I mean the Wall Street Journal gets online subscribers to pay, but then, that’s the Journal, not the Newark Star-Ledger or even the Miami Herald (which, by the way gets noticeably lighter every day when I fetch it from the driveway), for that matter.

“Can I imagine content going behind a pay wall?” asks Tom Curley, the CEO of the Associated Press. “Absolutely. And, yes, we are in conversations about that.” These conversations with other content players are informal, he admits. And a gazillion issues arise. One is that the Associated Press has a licensing agreement with Google, the particulars of which Curley would not detail, that won’t expire until December. (A Google spokeswoman declined to comment.) It’s also unclear how this would work for a newspaper or a TV operation that does not want to wholly destroy existing traffic.

As they say where I come from, it’s a puzzlement. The quandry is that online consumers of news and information are used to getting whatever they want — no matter how bad the quality — for free, all the time, and as much as they want. And how do you protect your content from being snagged by a blogger and posted on another Web site under the fair-use doctrine?

Perhaps, as the price of exclusive content goes up, the value of PR information will increase …

Fine notes that some smaller papers in smaller markets have been relatively successful in getting online subscribers to pay something — but that something is nowhere near as hefty as the former ad revenue stream.

But while the big-shot publishers discuss how much to charge for their locked-down content, I’m left wondering how this will affect the public relations practice. We’re already seeing a contraction of media outlets — there’s just one full-time travel editor left at a newspaper in the state of Florida — so if the AP goes behind a wall, will it even deign to take my press release? Or will I have to enter into an exclusive agreement that my release won’t be made available on, say, PR Newswire so that AP and its partners can assign a value to it?

Or does the scenario present a possible opportunity for the savvy PR practitioner? Already, we are seeing media relations lose the “media” part as the information we disseminate bypasses traditional media and lodges in the Yahoos of the world and all of the other sites that are programmed to respond to keyword searches and automatically snag and post information of interest to their readers.

Perhaps, just perhaps, as the price of exclusive content goes up, the value of the information I and my colleagues disseminate will increase in the eyes of consumers.

It’s not the first, and it likely will not be the last time a corporation breaks the unwritten rules of blogging to make the medium serve its business ends. But this time, it involves a multinational corporation (Coach), a trade group (International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition), an institution of higher learning (Hunter College), a class in public relations and a nonexistent student (Heidi Cee) in a conspiracy to further the IACC’s battle against fake Coach bags.

Adweek covered the details, but the big picture is that Coach gave Hunter a $10,000 grant to get the class to run the scam, a few months later Hunter received a $1 million donation from Coach’s CEO, Lew Frankfort, a Hunter alumnus. My, isn’t that a tangled Web they wove.

Here’s the gist of the scam, according to Adweek:

Hunter College students in New York couldn’t miss the poster plastered around the Upper East Side campus. Reading “MISSING — $500 reward!!” it was accompanied by a photo of a young, blonde, Heidi Cee, pleading for the return of her lost Coach bag.

Tear-off tabs listed Cee’s phone number, blog, MySpace page and Facebook profile. Visitors to the blog (encounterheidi.blogspot. com), which drew more than 15,000 hits after the posters went up, learned that the bag was a gift from an ex-boyfriend serving in Iraq.

One day, Cee blogged that another student had returned the bag. A day later, she wrote that on closer inspection, the bag was a fake and she had been scammed for the reward.

Outraged (”EFFING COUNTERFEIT!” she wrote), Cee blogged that she was researching the world of counterfeit goods. She discovered, she wrote, that they’re linked to criminal activity, child labor and terrorism. She even posted a video to YouTube about counterfeiting, “Break the Chain,” and organized an anti-counterfeiting event on campus that drew a crowd with free food and T-shirts.

Given the proliferation of fake blogs (also known as “flogs” or “flack blogs”), you might think folks would start to wise up. But in this case, which is an instance of “astroturfing,” or a fake grassroots campaign (IACC wants to end counterfeiting of brand names), it’s even more insidious. Heidi Cee’s Coach bag gets stolen, she blithely pays the reward for a fake, and the next thing you know, there’s a campus rally around IACC’s campaign.

There are two lessons here: The first is that as attractive as social media are as potential marketing tools for corporations, transparency and honesty are absolutely essential for corporate blogs; the second lesson here is that one should approach any blog (except this one, of course) with the same skepticism one reserves for the guy trying to sell you a “real” Rolex watch for $25.

About a month ago, the electricity suddenly went out in our Miami-based office and stayed off.

Some calls to clients and media outlets in South Florida and the Florida Keys revealed the problem was widespread throughout the state.

We quickly learned that much of the southern half of Florida was experiencing a massive blackout, due to a problem at Florida Power & Light’s Turkey Point power plant.

Fortunately, for residents and visitors in the Keys, most electricity in the island chain was restored within 30 minutes.

Despite our own power issues, I wanted to make sure that media points knew the Keys had electricity because South Florida’s power problems had quickly become a national story. So we started pushing out news releases with the aid of a battery-powered laptop computer and my Blackberry, which also functions as an Internet modem for the laptop.

I also began calling media outlets to reinforce the release verbally. When I called the CNN Miami Bureau, the producer there suddenly said, “Andy, we want you to go on live via phone.”

So as I was finishing up the interview with CNN anchors Don Lemon and Betty Nguyen, Don asked me if the power outage caused any serious problem in the Keys. I said that I was not aware of anything major, but the most important thing was that the margarita machines were once again in full operation. That evoked a chuckle from the anchors.

I completed my conversation with CNN and then my cell phone rang. It was a national Associated Press picture editor in New York, wondering if I had any available photos from the Keys showing the power outage. I explained power had quickly returned to the Keys, but we didn’t have anything that showed “lights out.” But then I remembered my margarita comment to CNN.

“Mike,” I said, “I’ll have a photo to you in less then 90 minutes to tell the story in the Keys.”

I called Rob O’Neal, our ace photo stringer in Key West.

“Rob, I need a picture that shows people at a bar in Key West, with someone making a colorful margarita,” I said. “And I’d love to have boats and/or water in the background and, by the way, I need it now!”

An hour later Rob sent the photo to me and after some toning and captioning, the image that moved around the nation of Schooner Wharf Bar owner Evalena Worthington pouring a red frozen margarita was the only still national media photo that showed a scene of electrical restoration in Florida.